E3 2003: Silent Scope 3

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By Mary Jane Irwin

In the event you missed Silent Scope 1, 2, or 3 when various versions of them were released in the arcades, Playstation 2 and Dreamcast, Konami is giving you the chance to relive all three titles on the Xbox in Silent Scope Complete.

The Silent Scope experience revolves around a man, his sniper rifle, and a crusade to rid the world of terrorists. The game play is that of a standard arcade shooter, where the character moves along on a predetermined path, while you busy yourself taking out targets.

In the E3 demo only the harbor mission from Silent Scope 3 was playable, but the menu also showed an unexplained and unplayable Silent Scope EX (which is supposedly the arcade version), while the original Silent Scope and Silent Scope 2 were nowhere to be found on the game menus.

The game play and visuals are virtually unchanged from the originals. When using the Xbox controller, you control your aim via the scope on your sniper rifle, which appears on your screen as a large circle that contains a magnified view of the area it's currently over (yes, it is like looking through a scope but without the tunnel vision) with the left control stick. The A button fires, and the squeezing the left trigger minimizes the scope to just crosshairs allowing for faster movement across the screen. The X, Y, and B buttons are used to readjust the height of your scope.

Silent Scope is easily playable with the controller, but for those who aren't excited by moving a glorified cursor over a terrorist's head for a kill, you will be able to replace the controller with a Mad Catz light gun. At the time Konami was unable to comment on whether or not Mad Catz will release a Silent Scope specific gun, but it is most likely that Silent Scope Complete will use the gun released for House of the Dead III.

Even without any apparent updates from the Silent Scope originals, the playable bits of Silent Scope Complete are still fun, and it looks like it will be especially enjoyable for fans of the Silent Scope series and arcade shooters. Konami also promises that there will be unlockable hidden stages and all missions will contain multiple routes and endings, offering plenty of reasons for fans to play through the complete series on Xbox. And, hopefully, Silent Scope will offer up another use for the Mad Catz blaster.